Marilyn Lemak: I 'did a terrible, tragic thing'

For the first time, the Naperville mother who killed her 3 children speaks publicly about the crime she did 13 years ago, about mental illness and about life in prison

March 25, 2012|By Stacy St. Clair, Chicago Tribune reporter

Marilyn Lemak says she needs the public to understand how sick she was when she murdered her three small children in March 1999, according to a video recently obtained by the Tribune. (Camicas Productions, Chicago Tribune)

Speaking in a thin, halting voice, Marilyn Lemak frequently pauses and searches for the right words as she tries to explain the inexplicable.

She says she needs the public to understand how sick she was when she murdered her three small children in March 1999, according to a video recently obtained by the Tribune. She wants people to know that she was a good mother, that she has not forgiven herself and that she wishes she were dead.

In a documentary slated to air Sunday on the French television channel M6, Lemak, 54, struggles to describe how a deepening depression amid a bitter divorce prompted her to drug and suffocate her children inside their Naperville home more than 13 years ago. She says she agreed to the TV interview — her first public comments since her arrest made national headlines — to help erase the stigma of mental illness, especially among affluent women with seemingly idyllic lives.

"I was a good mother who got very seriously mentally ill and did a terrible, tragic thing. And I think that was the depression," she says. "But I think that I was a good mother, yes."

Lemak is one of several women featured in the documentary "Mal de Mere," which examines how society responds to mentally ill mothers who harm their children. The Tribune, which allowed the French team access to its archives and to reporters who covered the case, received an unedited copy of the hourlong interview.

In the raw footage shot last August at the Dwight CorrectionalCenter in Livingston County, Lemak bears little resemblance to the vibrant, copper-haired mother who once enjoyed organizing play dates and school fundraisers. She now appears pale and surprisingly small, with thick eyeglasses, baggy prison garb and a utilitarian hairstyle that leave her looking both schoolmarmish and frail.

She describes how she laced her children's peanut butter sandwiches with prescription medication, then sang to them as they lost consciousness on March 4, 1999.

"And you cut their breaths?" the interviewer asks.

"Yes, I held my hand over their nose and mouths. Yes."

"And everything was finished?"

"Right," Lemak responds.

And for the first time she publicly acknowledges the magnitude of her crime.

"Looking back, how could I have done something like that?" she asks. "I don't want to make an excuse. I, I don't know if I'll be able to forgive myself or not. ... I'm trying but it hasn't happened yet."

Anger as motive

Lemak, a former surgical nurse, also slit her own wrist and swallowed several pills that night in a failed suicide attempt that authorities have long described as insincere and proof of her selfishness. Despite prosecutors' insistence that she committed the murders to hurt her then-estranged husband, Lemak says she did it to escape the pain brought on by depression.

"It had been weeks of this, and I was not getting any better. ... I was feelingworse and worse. I was feeling more hopeless, more helpless, like it was never going to get better," she says, shaking her head at the memory. "And I decided to take my own life and that my children would come with me because it would be better for them too."

Statistics, however, indicate that depression rarely leads to homicidal acts. To the contrary, prosecutors and expert witnesses argued that Lemak's actions the day of the murders — canceling the baby sitter and maid, cutting the phone, locking the doors — indicate a calculating, methodical woman in full control of her actions.

"There are hundreds of thousands of people who suffer depression on a daily basis, and they do not commit crimes," said DuPage County Assistant State's Attorney Joseph Ruggiero, who prosecuted the case in 2001. "These horrendous murders were generated and driven by her anger. While she was diagnosed with depression, the motive for these crimes was and always will be her anger."

Given the selective details and often jumbled recollections, it's clear that Lemak tries to shield herself from the fact that she murdered her young children: Nicholas, 7; Emily, 6; and Thomas, 3.

Though she acknowledges committing a terrible act, she avoids expressly saying she killed her children. She talks about the kids being in heaven or "not here," but she only once refers to them as dead. And she never calls them by name, instead referring to them as "my oldest," "my second" or "my third."

She maintains her composure throughout the interview with only a few exceptions. She truly cries just once, when she describes how she used to look at the three bright stars in Orion's Belt and imagine they were her children looking down on her.

"I think about it every day," she says of the slayings. "Why did I get to that point? And why didn't I die? And I haven't reached an answer ... there is no easy answer. But every day I think about them. Every day. And I wish that they were still here."